Sudan, and a New Day
It’s strange having ACU Lectureship in September.
Of course, we still have torrential rains and unruly weather (at least the first day), which is of course only part and parcel of the whole Lectureship experience.
One thing I think is just great is that my lovely wife Katrina, who married a nerdy little bible major and hung out with lots of my bible major buddies, is the first to be a speaker at Lectureship; with an art degree! How ironic.
Over the summer, she’s been working on a series of pieces regarding the suffering in Sudan and Northern Uganda. It has been facinating to journey with her in the emotions she has felt for this part of the world. A rage…(How could this be happening for so long and no one here knows about it?)…a confusion (much of her earlier artwork shows a lot, but some is not accurately reflective of the actual events going on in that region)…and hope.
Hope is what brought her to speak today before the curious crowd today. Hope told her that within each child soldier is a seed of promise - that things will actually turn out right - that there is a new King coming to set the record straight. A kind of king that binds up the broken, busts the slaves and prisoners out of captivity, and shouts at the top of his lungs that the Lord has come to bring comfort for those who mourn. Katrina’s paintings were a glimmer of that new Kingdom - a shadow of what we can already see breaking in to our hopeless world.
Yeah, Lectureship is strange in September- I am beginning to think that almost anything can happen…
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September 20th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
Wish I was there. I might actually break a self-imposed exile from lectureship…